Tupelo Quarterlyhttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com
We Hold the Gate OpenTue, 31 Jul 2018 17:33:26 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Dynamism and Defamiliarization in Kristin Robertson’s Surgical Winghttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/dynamism-and-defamiliarization-in-kristin-robertsons-surgical-wing/
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 17:16:56 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15026If you read Kristin Robertson’s debut book once, you really ought to read it again. In the very last poem, one finds oneself circling back to the beginning with a newfound understanding of Robertson’s self-awareness. By trafficking in sarcasm and irony, she reveals that throughout the sincerity and imagination of earlier pieces she has always known that the theme inescapably interacts with a trope: man as angel. As much as she defamiliarizes her subject, she cannot escape the association, until she finally acknowledges it; “Will Humans Ever Have Wings,” the last poem’s title asks, to which Yahoo Answers responds “that will probably NEVER happen. / Evolution produces only what is NECESSARY, / not what is cool.” Robertson’s willingness to engage in a found poem that treats her book’s premise as a ridiculous afterthought lightens the tone but also encourages a fresh understanding of her work. She is tempting us to question her, a fun and rewarding challenge on second read.

This is not to say that there isn’t plenty to reckon with the first time through. Every section begins with a poem titled “Clinical Trial: Human with Wings,” each report from a different day in the trial. The reprises of the poem aren’t aligned chronologically with the sections, a mimicry of the non-linear path of injury and recovery that patients of surgery often suffer. It seems that the patient or patients in this trial are struggling to remain grounded; the poems’ ties to the literal loosening as the wings graft and take root. In the earliest day presented in the trial, day 7 in section two, the patient is conversational: “what’s it like? Not what you’d think.” By day 46 in section one, the patient admits: “I find myself empathizing with bats...I’ve turned manic.” On day 203, section 3, the patient has “crossed into interstellar space.” The untethering is both literal and metaphysical. Because these pieces are out of order, the narrative arc of the book feels confused, an emotional dissonance especially resonant in the last poem, as all of the previous poems have resisted humor in favor of more serious situations coupled with a more haunting or colder tone (a woman jumping out of a window in “Loon,” strangulation in “Hyoid Bone,” and murdered students in “Haint Ceilings”).

Certainly, a book of poetry need not contain a narrative arc, and perhaps the ordering of the pieces of Clinical Trial is meant to push back on the notion that the book should be considered a singular rendering of the title, the disjointed nature of the arrangement reflective of the drastic tonal and emotional changes that the reader faces poem to poem. These dynamics present a struggle for agency, a struggle with the lack of control imposed by injury (emotional or otherwise), and the temptation of escapism attached universally to the concept of wings. In “Blue Herons,” the speaker struggles to save her cousin from an elusive illness, promising “next she’ll paint me with that fresh/water,” willing her to survive. In the very next poem, “Leaving Coins on the Mouths of Cadavers at Emory Hospital, a Defense,” the speaker is the only one with agency, the only adult, a chaperone on a camping trip responsible for the safety of her charges. From an autonomous agent to one peer pressured into submission, the speaker’s agency is again a 180-degree turn away with the arrival of “Alaskan Charter,” where the she is forced to beat a fish to death despite the act placing her “half in [her] dark grave.” Robertson is constantly defying expectation, beginning with clear narration and finishing with pure metaphor in a struggle to find a locus of control: “I told you I made rent/three summers working as the Snake Lady at a county fair...a whole sky I’ll gather by armfuls and climb back down into this life.” From literal to metaphorical, affable to frightening, the overarching gestures feel meant to keep us on our toes.

Robertson’s book, then, is not one that can be read passively. The use of second person, singular or plural, frequently pushes the reader into the often uncomfortable position of the speaker. In “Moon Elegy,” the speaker tells us that “we can’t remember/the bright surgical lamp, nurses above us/exhaling, You almost didn’t wake up” and yet by documenting the event it is implicit that some part of us can remember, that the trauma transcends memory. While on a fishing trip in “Alaskan Charter,” the speaker tells us “they hand you a club/and say, Don’t be a cunt./With a fifth strike, the spinal cord/snaps, slips through your fist.” The urgency in both pieces lies in a primal fear of death accompanied by a primal fear of killing—Robertson forces us as readers to inhabit both positions with her, to stand with each speaker entirely and accept the feeling of being overwhelmed.

In part, Surgical Wing is so absorbing and the direct address is so successful because of form. All of these poems, aside from reprisals of Clinical Trial, are in couplets. As F.M. Warren notes in Modern Philology, couplets have traditionally been a narrative form, deriving from French poetry. Even though each poem contributes an isolated narrative, in their repetitive imagery they call back to the theme and beg consideration with respect to one another. Avian imagery riddles nearly every poem, but Robertson’s subjects of interest change. She writes of a historical figure in “Audubon Ate His Birds,” twisting the traditional tale, and contends with pop-culture in “Letter to Tippi Hendren.” In “Rules of Surgery” and “Emergency Rooms During Thunder Storms,” we are back in hospitals, in the first as a medical trainee and in the second as one of many patients, each a different type of bird. We are “all of us, lost in the wild.” Robertson’s capacity to defamiliarize a poetic image so overwrought as the bird speaks to her creative talent. In Surgical Wing the “milk-white raven brings doom,” “pelicans barrel/toward the widening pupil of glittering ocean,” and “wrens and angels” sit side by side. Previously held associations with every sort of bird are eliminated—she, in essence, re-names them.

Though the narratives are isolated, the couplets are not. when Robertson does choose to enjamb, she does so artfully, making room for surprise (“I left it/on the floor of my closet until the cat crawled in/and died”) and powerful, compelling cascades of sound (“these puffer fish secrete their own apocrypha,/which, young anglers, will become your pillow talk:/taped mouths scream on the slab, skin winces/at the first slice”). The hard Ps of puffer, apocrypha, and pillow make for meaty lines while the sibilance of secrete, scream, slab, skin, and slice quickens the pace. In “Lionfish,” the alliteration also pushes the piece forward: “after sex I say we need a safe word—/not for rope burns or blindfolds—/but for when he wants to kill himself” reaching a climax in the middle: “coolers of ice in her candlelit kitchen,” “greening the glass like a rapid frost,” and resolving in a quiet gesture all the more powerful for its sonic deviation from expectation: “hovering over the cooler, gazing down at a seashell, like the goddess of love.” In this way, Robertson’s use of sound is reminiscent of Claudia Emerson, whose in-rhyme and frequent consonance is largely sculpted by enjambment, allowing her to escape her own patterns at the last second (“I confess that last house was the coldest/I kept. In it, I became formless as fog, crossing/the walls, formless as your breath as it rose/from your mouth to disappear in the air above you”).

Robertson also situates herself among contemporaries in her first book’s construction: a recurrent theme dominates across sections while a variety of speakers use shared imagery to implicitly reference it, even as they tell their own stories. Kaveh Akbar’s “Portrait of the Alcoholic...” series in Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Nicky Beer’s recurrent octopus poems in The Octopus Game come to mind as immediate parallels to “Clinical Trial: Human With Wings,” arising repeatedly throughout the book but varying each time and always contextualizing the poems around them. Alongside these poets, Robertson encourages us to consider what separates a project book, if such a category is to exist, from a book with strong through-lines or transcending questions. Though Robertson doesn’t do as much with white space as the above poets, “Abecedarian for the Death Moment” and “Rules of Surgery” play with form brilliantly. What makes Robertson singular is her uncanny ability to take an age-old idea and present it in an entirely new light. In the very first poem, the first part of “Clinical Trial: Human with Wings,” She asks us “are these ashes? Am I rising in flames?” and over the course of the book, via a painfully sincere yet oblique investigation of man’s endless desire for flight, we are forced to answer her—either she is a phoenix, or she is Icarus, and it is in our hands to decide.

Joey Lew is a MFA candidate in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She holds a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Yale University, where she was a member of WORD: Spoken Word Poetry. An interview that she conducted is forthcoming in Diode.

]]>A Meditation on Form and Voice in Maryann Corbett’s Street Viewhttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/a-meditation-on-form-and-voice-in-maryann-corbetts-street-view/
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 17:13:14 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15023Christopher Isherwood once paid tribute to the technical facility of his friend W.H. Auden, a facility evident even when Auden was at university: “You could say to him: ‘Please write me a double ballade on the virtues of a certain brand of toothpaste, which also contains at least ten anagrams on the names of well-known politicians, and of which the refrain is to be as follows . . .’ Within twenty-four hours, your ballade would be ready – and it would be good.”

I don’t know that Maryann Corbett has ever been issued a similar challenge, but I have no doubt she could pull it off. Street View, Corbett’s fourth book of poetry, contains well-turned examples of enough forms – sonnets, triolets, heroic couplets, bout-rimés, and Old English alliterative verse, among others – that it could easily stand as a textbook of style for budding poets.

A resident of St. Paul, Minnesota, Corbett has spent most of her adult life living in the Twin Cities. Though she was trained as a medievalist and linguist, Corbett spent 35 years working as an in-house writing teacher, editor, and indexer for the Minnesota state legislature. That insistence on clarity that she attempted to inculcate into the framers of bills is evident in her poetry.

Corbett’s strengths are intelligence, a good ear, and the ability to make imaginative leaps that leave most poets behind. Who else has compared a defibrillator in its glass case to a roadside shrine [“Heart Event”] or can swerve from a quotation from Juvenal asking the gods for long life to “the head of Ted Williams, in tin-canned cryonic suspension” [“Dreams of My Teeth”]? A billboard advertising the chicken wings served by an Asian-American restauranteur named Art Song leads Corbett to a consideration of other “art songs,” specifically Schubert’s song “The Trout,” and then to the multitude of little-noticed artists who slave at low-paying day jobs to fund a passion that will never make them famous [“Stream”]. A bit of a stretch? Yes, but she makes it work.

Corbett’s speakers have the virtues commonly associated with the educated middle class: level-headedness, good will, a sense of civic duty, and an awareness that not everyone has had the same advantages while growing up. In one poem, she looks at the middle-aged Laotian refugee greeting guests in broken English at the restaurant the family has managed to establish after many years in a foreign land and wonders, “What compensates for losing everything?” [The Restaurants of Frogtown]. The speaker goes on an annual walking tour of historic houses and gardens and, while admiring the beauty of the architecture and grounds, cannot forget the robber barons who built them.

As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

[“Historic District, Walking Garden Tour”]

For Corbett’s speaker(s), liberal guilt is never far away. “Alternate Routes” is a poem composed of two sonnets. In the first, the suburban professionals ride an express bus to their jobs downtown, enjoying “their meditation on the book, / the screen, the earbud.” In the second sonnet, night shift nurses, underground band members, and the homeless-shelter dwellers climb groggily aboard an early-morning local bus to take them to an often-tenuous rest. The speaker sympathizes with their lot, yet there’s a part of her that wonders about what she might have missed in her well-ordered life as she ponders “these wilder riches.”

Similarly, in “Stoplight, with Wingèd Chariot,” the speaker finds her car next to a car with a formidable sound system cranked up to the max and spewing rap. The misogynistic lyrics of the song hit like a gut punch, yet there’s also an attraction, a sort of nostalgie pour la boue.

Yes, you have my full attention,

Monstersinger beside me. That’s the game
old rhymers played. Same iron gates of life
banging, same tearing pleasures, ripping the same

raw wound. Old rhyme, new rap, snick of the knife –
What if I strafed back with the whole Roget
and gunned my engine to its own rough strife . . . ?

And yet the speaker won’t seize that kind of day. Curiosity, concern, pity, wry acceptance – such are the emotions that well-mannered Minnesotans allow themselves to display. There are occasional flashes of other emotions in Corbet’s poems – a this-can’t-be-happening panic when the husband had a heart attack [“Heart Event”], the ache for children, now “strangers / tall and tense and text message crazed” who seldom visit [“Spoonspell”]. But in general, there’s a reticence to expose too much, a resistance that finds itself validated by the example of those one has seen who ventured too close to the edge and fell in, like the former grad student who haunts the undergraduate campus, lecturing to no one at night in the library stacks [“Weirdos”].

The strongest emotion coursing through the poems is an elegiac melancholy: “ . . .the sweet illusion of changeless time, / though I wish for it fiercely, will not come back” [“Lament for the Midnight Train”]. Here, Corbett’s speaker visits her childhood home and finds it waiting to be torn down so that a McMansion can be erected, as has happened to the plots on either side [“Teardown”]. Getting her hair cut, the speaker notices the clippings in her lap, and their black and gray reminds her of the cigarette ashes her father left all over their house: “I, too, turn to ash / cigarette-wise, my loose ends / cinder-swept away” [“Haircut, with Vision of My Father’s Ashes”].

But the melancholy doesn’t sink into self-pity, and behind it all there is a gentle humor, an acceptance, expressed in rhymes and other wordplay that are often delightful. I recommend this satisfying book.

Reagan Upshaw is a poet and critic living in Beacon, NY. His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in Able Muse, American Journal of Poetry, E-verse Radio, Poets & Writers, the Washington Post, and many other publications.

]]>“I’m not human, I’m grammarian”: Life, Being, and Grammar in Aditi Machado’s Some Beheadingshttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/im-not-human-im-grammarian-life-being-and-grammar-in-aditi-machados-some-beheadings/
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 17:07:40 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15020Towards the end of her debut book, Some Beheadings, Aditi Machado’s speaker in “Prospect” ponders their ontological nature: “…I think/I’m not human, I’m grammarian.” It is not a surprising thought by that point in the collection. Machado consistently interrogates how grammar, diction, and syntax all constitute personhood or being. She does this by relentlessly destabilizing traditional grammar throughout Some Beheadings. Poems contain constant references to the “textual” nature of everyday objects and experiences, an awareness that recognizes both the expansiveness and the restrictions of language and words. As the poetry editor of Asymptote, a journal of translation, and as a translator in her own right, one gets the feeling that Machado is more sensitive to these notions than most.

Some Beheadings consists of twelve poems, most taking up a number of pages, complete with subheadings. Some poems seem to really be about three or four different smaller poems, others have wild variation in form from one page to the next, shifting from prosaic lines and paragraphs to three words and two lines on a single page. Machado’s ambition to question all the conventions of poetry, from grammar to structure, is the greatest strength of her book, because with such a lofty goal (one Machado will never be able to fully realize), we cannot help but start asking the same questions of other texts present in our lives.

The reader might feel perplexed when the entire foundation of language shakes under their feet, but Machado likely intends for her readers to experience this shakiness in order to force us to interrogate the grammar around us. She is mostly successful in her effort, while a few times the reader gets lost trying to figure out which critique of conventions is given priority in a certain poem. I’m not arguing that this multi-faceted attempt at destabilization is flawed, but rather at points it is hard to detect the formal disruptions when you are having trouble figuring out who is speaking, and the other way around.

For example, in the first poem “Prospekt” (note the different spelling), Machado gives the reader what might be the best clue to finding a key to unlock her book: “…when I speak/the fascist in me speaks” and “..there is a house/I move through.” Machado is clearly influenced by Heidegger’s most famous idea “language is the house of being,” through which we understand that Machado’s project fully explores what it means to challenge the traditional grammar that restricts and norms Being into an easily digestible thought. It doesn’t take long for Machado to push that grammar. On page 7 in one of the smaller sections of “Prospekt,” the speaker states “When I think myself I do not disappear. / When I think my thinking my thinking disappears.” Machado deftly maneuvers the reader along the logic the speaker decides to follow. How does one conceive of themselves, and what does thinking about thinking look like? It looks like the erasure of typical sentence construction, since the speaker is mainly talking about themselves and for themselves. But the greatest elision of grammar comes on page 18, still part of “Prospekt”: “I were an I wending the garden, I there way out there/ picking flowers in the heat.” The speaker has moved to a place where their various selves are not just in their head but also out in the physical world, multiple “I’s” occupying space. But Machado’s messing with grammar becomes “this love of grammar” that her speaker “cannot resist.”

Once Machado’s speaker has been freed from the constraints of grammar, the poems in the middle of the book have a more liberated feel. Whereas “Prospekt” typically stayed at the top of the page, and didn’t argue much with the left margins, these shorter poems jump all over the page, creating acres of white space. The middle poems, “Speeches, Minor” in particular, attack the foundations of “textual experience” with their form, while the grammar stays fairly typical, if still in reflection of the grammar breakthrough in “Prospekt.” “Speeches, Minor” contains several voices, one in particular offset by carrots (<<) seems to have a more honest and direct approach than the more academic tone of the main speaker in these poems. “In a kernel I admit/ I am deeply/ but have not yet found/ my apathy,” says the (perhaps still internal?) voice, speaking to the feeling one has that Machado’s speaker has exploded the boundaries of grammar, but they haven’t accomplished their goal of relating their lived experience as fully as possible. The speaker admits this and wants to continue trying, stating “There is a richness in saying everything we know./ There is a richness in saying everything, we know,”.

But for now, meditating on how a Being operates in the physical world is the speaker’s main task. The speaker also spends a lot of time in natural and garden spaces across the collection, another echo of Heidegger and his obsession with primal, natural beauty as a metaphor for language. Machado’s speaker explains this fascination best when she states in “Prospekt”: “One way to see grammar is to think fields, how bare they are until you/ look underneath. At their limits are nouns to which you run & you pick/ them up & cannot.”

By far the most significant poem in Some Beheadings is the eleven-page “Route: Marienbad,” the climax of a series of long poems with “Route” in the title. “Route: Marienbad” takes advantage of every technique Machado has used so far, with stanzas appearing on both margins, lines on the bottom of the page, entire stanzas capitalized, and of course destabilizing grammar. Roughly about how dreamscapes can seem real while in the dream, and for some time after, “Route: Marienbad” is the perfect synthesis of Machado’s varying goals. A dreamscape is where all of her concerns (about being lost in language, sexuality, and all life as a textual experience) can exist without one consuming or overpowering the others. Perhaps “Route: Marienbad” proposes that the rest of the poems in Some Beheadings need to be viewed in that context, but its specific lines about dreaming indicate otherwise. “…[C]an you wake up/ from a sentence like/ you wake up on the porch?” asks the speaker of “Route: Marienbad.” The only answer that can be given is “I SLEEP AND WAKE AND SLEEP AND WAKE AND/ THIS IS PROSODY.”

Machado’s poems make the reader reconsider just what the line between speaker and poet looks like, and whether the poetry world at large needs to reconsider whether that line is just a bit smaller than we usually think. If all of life is a textual experience, if our actions are a form of writing in and of themselves, then we are all constantly speaking and having poetry written around us. But more importantly, Machado forces us to consider that even as we create a textual experience, for some that experience is not as liberating as it is for others. Machado, a poet of color, knows this from living in our biased culture, and knows that the act of translating words, or action, or anything, means that something pure can be lost in the process. In an interview with Chicago Review of Books, she summed up her philosophy on poetry quite succinctly: “Poetry is untranslatable.” Some Beheadings understands that the poetry of life and dreams can’t be translated either, as it is just another form of language that is molded and crafted when put on the page. But maybe, as we wander down the garden paths, we can see a clearing, as Heidegger would say, and that is where a meaning might be found, if only for a passing moment.

Michael Pittard is a poet currently in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He plays bluegrass fiddle and is an avid Manchester United fan. He lives in Winston-Salem with his partner and their cat, Roosevelt.

]]>“Make Love Out of the Kick and the Punch”: A Review of Heather Derr-Smith’s Thrusthttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/make-love-out-of-the-kick-and-the-punch-a-review-of-heather-derr-smiths-thrust/
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:46:34 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15009It’s inevitable that social media’s ubiquitous presence in most of our lives has changed not just the way we interact with and see each other but the way we read as well; we read to seek out a fuller understanding of ourselves and others, and social media fulfills this need, but in bursts and often without context—the windows without the house.

Much of social media focuses on references to action rather than becoming action—we see this in the rise of Instapoetry, which relies heavily on abstractions, as if the less said, the more of our own meaning we can pour in. None of this is to indict either social media or how some are using it to create and promote a new strain of writing, but it does help us see Heather Derr-Smith’s newest collection, Thrust, as a kind of antidote to the abstract. Through its poems concerning the intersection of violence, sex, and place, Thrust is a collection that verbs.

Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, Thrust is not content to allude to action when it can instead become it. The poems are firmly rooted in a physical space, the dirt and rust of the South, while also considering human experience as perceived through first the body then the brain and heart, finding this to be a place of infinite danger and surprising delight.

It is sound and often verbs which engine this book through its poems and realizations. We see this even in the collection’s smart title, which carries with it connotations of need, desire, and sex, and the latter as experienced by women cannot be assumed to always be consensual. Several of the poems have titles which follow this impulse, including “Stitch,” “Flash,” “Gouge,” and “Eat.” Through all of the poems, our reading of these titles shifts—sometimes they are commands, sometimes they are nouns—just as the violence at the heart of so many of these pieces both circles and is circled, pushed both away and through.

In “Stitch,” the tension between this shifting (verb as action, noun as acted-upon) highlights the collection’s desire to work through body trauma while according agency to the “she”:

In the house of her childhood, now empty,

rage like chain-lightning threw its fists,

the count in seconds quivering against her pubis. She outlasted them all,

her own cloud of witness. She rubbed her language against the skin of theirs,

the sobbing in the closet behind the silk nightgowns

and the AR-15’s,

a force that had seemed upstoppable, nitroglycerin in her veins,

threatening to blow them all to smithereens. She was untouchable,

outside the reach of God, Heathen.

Passages such as this display Derr-Smith’s tightly tuned attention to our sonic expectations, turning “cloud of whiteness” to “witness,” this poem’s marching song, and the poet’s name Heather turned “Heathen.” We see in here also stitching as an act, piercing, leaving behind it a hole. But a stitch is also a way to heal, and in the traditional craft work of women, stitching can be used to thread to life a story, a document of survival, as it is here when later in the poem she writes: “they had all been frightened of her, how she rose from the blows, / like the ring of a bell, unbreakable.”

The poems in Thrust consciously avoid euphemism or gauzy filters, instead affecting the sensation of action through language and sound, such as in “I-95” with its “labia parted like specimen, like snarl.” The sexual and physical violence these poems depict are offered with precision, a hard-won clarity, born of a desire to understand how assault can feel like attention, which when we are beat-down can feel like love. “I know one thing,” Derr-Smith writes in the poem “Catherine’s Furnace”:

I was worth beating down, a pulp. Someone wanted me so damn bad,

like a desire that was desperate, hogtied.

Didn’t it feel like some kind of love, baby girl, rabbit-punched?

The same poem ends with the lessons its speaker has learned, offered without euphemism: “Make love out of the kick and the punch. / Make beauty out of the cunt, a glowing ember.”

The play with verbs and nouns here is central—the only verb offered is make, a command, with words like love, kick, and punch offered in their noun state, as if to say when we cannot change the nouns we’re given, our only choice is in our verbs.

Thrust also considers the relationship between place and acts, how story becomes history and eventually a legacy. Many of the pieces are rooted in rural Virginia and carry in them an iron smell of soil. Perhaps this is due in part to the poems’ directives to uncover, unearth what is under, as in “Eat”:

Go back to Virginia.

Go down under the earth, where the soldiers

lie tangled together in their roots

Go back to Virginia.

Go down by the river, where the boys of summer

undo their belts. I’ll be waiting there for you.

What emerges here is a concern for the submerged, the hushed-over and glossed up. The roots of Virginia cannot be separated from slavery, from sedition and war, and we’re asked to consider what has come from this, what violence has leached through the earth. Offered as example is this poem’s speaker: “I’m sawn in half, girl in a box. / Split me apart and divide. / Rusty dress, the color of clots.”

Thrust has come to us just when we need it—to listen to the full complexity of women’s experiences. As readers, we are asked not to simply consider a curated photo, posted and liked, but the blood and dirt from which the smile in the frame sprang.

It is a collection that would have us answer the question in the poem “The Virginia Museum of the Confederacy,” “This moment exists, / what are you going to do with it?”

Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Beginning this fall, she will be a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Central Missouri and the poetry editor for Pleiades.

]]>“With Every Register of Her Seven Tongues”: A Review of Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villageshttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/with-every-register-of-her-seven-tongues-a-review-of-tarfia-faizullahs-registers-of-illuminated-villages/
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:40:09 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15005Tarfia Faizullah’s new collection of poems, Registers of Illuminated Villages, engages with issues of grief, trauma, ancestry, and joy in a voice that is always attentive and intensely lyric. Faizullah untangles matters of societal and ancestral influence; she catalogs the ways we hurt and affirm each other; and she answers each question with the utmost lyricism, as if song itself is the suitable answer to hard-to-answer questions.

Registers of Illuminated Villages continues work begun in Faizullah’s first collection, Seam, in that both books dig into an existential tension presented by large-scale global injustice. Is it possible to fully acknowledge the pains of this world – to listen to grieving voices – and not be irrevocably torn by them? What does it mean to desire a life in this world, knowing the dangerous and terrible ways human life has enacted change in this world?

In Registers of Illuminated Villages, Faizullah never allows her speakers to ignore uncomfortable realities, yet neither does she allow those realities to overwhelm her speakers in unproductive ways. Faced with violences that are large and small, systemic and personal, Faizullah creates room for acknowledgement and ultimately returns to the world around her, changed but not destroyed. We are asked once “to accept that the lesson learned / from a plane barreling into a pentagon // is that fire will always only ever / come close to ravishing stone.” Perhaps the poet herself is preserved by her ability to convert both tragedy and ecstasy into lyricism and song. In the face of the unexplainable, she “learns the nature of light / by revising the dark into song with every / register of her seven tongues.”

As a book about trauma and loss – although this collection is about much more than just trauma and loss – Registers of Illuminated Villages suggests that the grief’s strength comes from the attention and particularity with which we grieve. The book suggests that a specific and accurate recognition of pain and loss does something to create a productive space for that pain. In every instance, whether confronting traumas on a personal or global level, words pass through the speaker’s lips with an amazing clarity and vision.

We are told of a lost child, for example, that “exactly seven yellow poppies grew / from the mouth of her corpse.” The child’s friends, too, are praised for “how precisely they lamented her.” In the collection’s first poem we are asked, “who counts dolls, hand- / stitched, facedown in dirt?” and “who will count the amputated hands of thieves?” Through these questions, the reader gets the sense that such a counting might constitute a life attentively and compassionately lived. Isn’t it, after all, recognition that loss and pain demand?

In a poem about the slaughter and preparation of a goat, we are told “It is / important // to observe / death,” and such an imperative rings true in a world where death and injustice easily become faraway abstractions – images sandwiched between shoe advertisements and cat memes. The lesson about grief is that it demands our attention and that acknowledgement is a form of affirmation, if not love.

What’s more, this belief in attention as a source of affirmation extends beyond the localities of grief and trauma. The speaker approaches the world of these poems with receptivity and open eyes, looking closely at every true thing. The sky of these poems is “famished with stars” and the speaker can’t “help but count each scorched one.” We see her “pry open phonebooks and recite the names of strangers,” and as strongly as we feel moved to grief through the acknowledgement of loss, we are moved to joy and awe through the acknowledgement of life. Even so, we never escape grief entirely. Rather, the attentive stance brings us to a full-to-bursting awareness of a world that is bustling with life and death and beauty and tragedy. In “Because There’s Still A Sky, Junebug,” the speaker accounts

tonight, a drone
in Yemen detonates and rends the sky,
and in my father’s garden,drone is a stingless bee unable
to make honey,

detailing the ways in which memory and daydream and grief mix inextricably in a single moment of existence. The ending of the poem reads,

because
there is still a head-scarfed girl
who sucks the sugar
from a ginger candy
before she explodes – I look up,
and above the sky still flints with so many stars. Above me.
Above you.

It might seem tempting for some readers to interpret the “looking up” at the end of this poem as a way of avoiding the unpleasant sadnesses and griefs brought on by war, but there are no such avoidances in Registers of Illuminated Villages. This book oscillates constantly between the world that is here and the world that has been destroyed, never ignoring any bit of reality – no matter how inconstant or unpleasant.

The poems in Registers of Illuminated Villages also take a scrutinizing look at desire, forcing readers to acknowledge the ways in which our hungers, sighs, dreams, and pursuits change the world around us. We are asked to consider “why the ocean inside the drunkard never sleeps” and what that insomnia might mean. At separate points in Registers of Illuminated Villages, desire is both the force of destruction and a way of returning to the immediate realities of the world. Contrastingly, readers are shown the ways in which complex and sometimes-twisted longings motivate instances of invasion, violation, sacrifice, and love.

In “Djinn In Need of A Bitch,” for example, a spirit’s refrain becomes “I need, I need”; and although a woman is the centerpiece of this particular need, the poem depicts a hunger that could consume nations of women. Interestingly, this hunger is not uniquely isolated to one gender, class, race, or ethnicity. In fact, in “Djinn In Need of A Bitch” the speaker commiserates with her assailant, saying, “I know it’s not me he wants, but / the night is a varnished peeling wall // against which I, too, want again to be / roughly pressed.” One of this book’s tasks is to unwrap the possibility that a desire for destruction constitutes the center of us. Who among us, after all, has not been stunned by “the defiance of forest fires?”

More than merely indulging perverse fascinations, however, Registers of Illuminated Villages asks us to engage more deeply with our desires. That we need is undeniable, but isn’t it possible to use that need to create instead of destroy? As one speaker asks, “do we ever learn / that we’re given weapons / to be vicious so we can be sweet?” It is the same mouth that kisses and screams, and maybe also the same emotional reservoir behind each action. Of course, it’s never so black and white; but each of these poems engages meaningfully and particularly with each situation to uncover the reason behind the reasons.

Another large concern of Registers of Illuminated Villages is the idea of ancestry, heritage, and societal influence. Some such influences are steeped in and informed by historical injustices that give rise to the subtler, everyday violences of misogyny, xenophobia, and cultural intolerance. Other of these influences rise like steam out of the still-steeping waters of childhood, love, and personal trauma. Yes, these poems contain drivers of trucks shouting, “go back to your own country,” and they contain instances of deceased relatives offering dinner party advice. “Variations on A Cemetery in Summer,” a poem meaningfully penned on July, 4, 2004, affirms and questions many forms of cultural and personal heritage; and at one point we are told prophetically that

A flag crinkles the breeze
with its histories.
A country sighs, struggles
to remember to gaze
at its own stories of stars.

Perhaps the message of these ancestral meditations is that an incongruous nation is comprised of many people who don’t know who they are. “Help me, Lord. / There are so many bodies inside this one” says the speaker of “Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine’s School for Girls”; and who among us has not felt equally fractured by the world’s many hands, all trying to form us in different ways? As Faizullah’s speakers come to understand these influences and their effects on selfhood, the question turns inward, and we are encouraged to untangle the ways in which we influence the people around us.

Readers of Registers of Illuminated Villages will benefit from the time spent looking closely at things. Faizullah is an excellent guide through the world around us – the one that exists despite the violences and traumas we have enacted on it and its inhabitants. Like the best poets do, Faizullah teaches us that the world isn’t as easy to understand as a quick glance might reveal, and her work encourages us to look again with steady eyes.

Wesley Sexton is pursuing an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in online journals such as Story South, the Adroit Journal, and The Connecticut River Review. He lives with his wife and cat near a large Pin Oak tree and several brambleberry shrubs.

]]>Falling in Love with the World: A Review of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanichttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/falling-in-love-with-the-world-a-review-of-aimee-nezhukumatathils-oceanic/
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:33:55 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=15002In Oceanic, her fourth collection of poetry, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes a series of love letters to the world and its inhabitants. From intimate psalms of love to her husband—whose love wields electricity as they ascend the Swiss Alps—to poems addressed to starfish, turtles, and the Northern Lights, the “you” in each poem is as fluid and varied as the structures she uses to encapsulate all subjects. The tender, introspective “Self-Portrait as Scallop” and “The Two Times I Loved You on a Farm” carry the eye in a wavelike rhythm with lines spaced elegantly across the landscape of the page, while poems like “Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog” showcase her adroitly crafted couplets. Marine biology, feathers, flight, passion—these thread her poems in a cohesive arc firmly planting the speaker in a world that demands unflinching attention. With her signature language whose register is both lyric and conversational, sonic lines rich with seamless pairings of sound and dynamic imagery, in bold and yet vulnerable sincerity she observes and ponders the marriage of science and love—the double star Albireo whose blue and gold entities melding into one she refashions into the oneness of romance, or the “underwater volcanoes” and “pillow lava” that give a night of passion a geography, a second physicality. Touching upon familiar themes of identity and placement that recall her earlier works, Nezhukumatathil invites the world to see “the dark sky as oceanic, boundless, limitless— ... / Let’s listen / how this planet hums with so much wing, fur, and fin.”

Early in Oceanic, Nezhukumatathil reintroduces the theme of multicultural identity and couples the grace of girlhood with the violence of being carved into Otherness. “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” is an address, a guide, to the child whose teacher eviscerates the pronunciation of her non-western name. Nezhukumatathil creates a theater of discomfort and sterility, meshing the smells of “fake-lemon antiseptic” with “freshly soaped necks / and armpits.” She focuses on the brutality of a butchered name with the vivid image of a bloody sausage casing trapped between her teacher’s teeth as he fumbles awkwardly with “a white, sloppy apron.” At once the class turns, anticipating a reaction, but the child resists the further objectification of being exhibited and scrutinized. The speaker, who begins the poem with the instruction, “Breathe deep,” now guides the child into a meditation of seawater. The child is drawn into a reprieve, a halcyon memory of traveling with her family, who:

took you to the China Sea and you sank

your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars...

Here Nezhukumatathil uses alliteration, the soft “s” binding together a sea image. The face that the classmates crane to see is now buried in gentle water. The speaker bids her to consider this, to remember the tender innocence of her classmates being toweled dry and dressed for school before she juxtaposes this with an image of a handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade. Even the children are culpable of this butchery, their transient innocence halted in school, where they are discovered to be capable of the handheld violence of misunderstanding and distancing.

In contrast, her elegiac tribute to a more understanding teacher in “Mr. Cass and the Crustaceans” celebrates the shared love of science that also created a safe space for identity. As “the only brown girl / in the classroom,” the child—this time the speaker, no longer being held at arm’s length, but free to invite the reader into her psyche—once again places her face in water to take in the life beneath its surface. This time, it is not an act of escape, but of engagement. Her teacher’s invitation to “listen”—to water, but also to the intuitive introspection that sinking one’s face into water evokes—empowers the no-longer-bridled woman whose feet are planted on two continents. “In Praise of My Manicure” is a bold, flamboyant celebration of “blending out.” Unconcerned with the hapless task of fitting in, the speaker connects the world in a network of interrelations, likening herself to preschoolers in a rainstorm, coins in a fountain, red starfish, Kathakali dancers, as she paints her nails and thus effects a posture to scare and to dazzle. “You’ll never be able to catch my pulse, my shine,” she dares the reader.

This bridges the core topic that Oceanic as a whole explores: the discovery of life in all its forms. Nezhukumatathil’s “Invitation” cocks an ear to the planet’s hum with wing, fur, and fin—a wing she later covets in “Love in the Time of Swine Flu”—and a hum to which she returns in “I Could Be a Whale Shark.” Round with pregnancy, the speaker once again enters the China Sea, now established as a threshold for transformation. Here she is transforming into a mother, through the physicality of pregnancy moles and voracious appetite—and both feeling the life within her and fearing the sting of the jellyfish, she ponders again the “humming on this soft earth.” In doing so, she assigns sound to the mystery of life—the time it takes to eat pizza or hear a heartbeat, to create an ocean or shift Los Angeles north, and at the very bottom, she discovers a bee. The reverie of time she chronicles as a declaration of love, the infinite number of events that her love for “you” will outlast. Her Dickinsonian bee reemerges in another love poem, equally surreal in its likening her separation from her beloved to winning second place in a bee-wearing contest. She loses to a guy completely covered “in hum.” The motif of humming has transformed the very word, so that verb becomes object. It is no longer something to hear passively; it is a garment to wear, to cover oneself completely.

Oceanic is a story of restoration, and the end goal is love. The heroes and victims of “The Falling: Four Who Have Intentionally Plunged Over Niagara Falls with the Hope of Surviving,” in which she channels the different personas with varied structures, considers the happiness of the discovered severed arm or the tender companionship of George Strathakis’ pet turtle. The scar from her C-Section she refashions in a self-portrait as a second smile; the blade of her classmates’ pencil sharpener she repurposes as a signifier of love and sex in the shared knife that awakens desire in “This Sugar,” and in “Aubade with Cutlery and Crickets,” in which the allure of her lover is likened to the smell of knives and the movement of blades. She gathers the vast geographies of the world together in a collective theater, as her poems sweep across Singapore, the Philippines, China, India, Switzerland, and the United States. Her found poems manifest the clumsy—and her “Inside the Cloud Forest Dome” showcase a more graceful recovery of—misunderstandings in cross-cultural encounters and the beauty of each place in its sense of wonder, in the life it holds, as “My South,” taken from Whitman, hearkens on a classic Nezhukumatathil theme: land in regards to love. Aimee Nezhukumatathil in her South, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil issuing a prayer for her family in an ascending plane or stretching her body across the limber surface of the China Sea, celebrates her world and the renewing act of falling in love with it.

Shannon Nakai has published work in Kaye Linden’s 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems, The Bacopa Literary Review, River City Poetry, and others. She has an MFA in Creative Writing in Poetry from Wichita State University, where she also teaches English. A former Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, she currently lives with her husband in central Kansas.

Laura Chalar was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a lawyer, writer and translator, and the author of two English-language poetry collections,Midnight at the Law Firmand Unlearning (Coal City Press, 2015 and 2018 respectively). Her work has been featured in magazines internationally. The Guardian Angel of Lawyers, her first short story collection to be published in the USA, Is forthcoming from Roundabout Press.

I’ve finally found the river,
the one where my enemies
will never float by, where
the fish stay silent and the birds
keep to themselves. Every feather is
just a feather. The séance
is over. The tarot turns up
blank as in a magic trick.
I wash all the windows and
shut every door. I won’t be
seeing you again. The light
illuminates the basic facts, and
I pull the blanket off the bed
just to find my latest
parallel universe: this is the dead
beauty in my hands, disreputable
and melancholy. I pretend
nothing is connected, no single
human can ever see into
what the world has always known:
I’m on my back in the water
while the fish and birds play each other’s
tambourines in the night.

Dana Curtis’ third full-length collection of poetry, Wave Particle Duality, was recently published by blazeVOX Books. Her second collection, Camera Stellata, was published by CW Books, and her first book, The Body’s Response to Famine, won the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in such publications as Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Elixir Press and lives in Denver Colorado.
]]>PITTSBURGH WAS MY MINNEAPOLIS: An Essay in Episodes by Julie Marie Wadehttp://www.tupeloquarterly.com/pittsburgh-was-my-minneapolis-an-essay-in-episodes-by-julie-marie-wade/
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 04:00:58 +0000http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/?p=14623

“The Main Setting”

Let’s remember that when Mary Richards shows up in Minneapolis, she’s a stranger to us. Soon, we’ll learn she’s had a steady boyfriend for the last two years. We’ll discover Bill let Mary “nearly support him” throughout his residency. We’ll come to understand they were planning to get married until Bill, testing the perks and prestige of his fresh M.D., posed the question, “Why rush into things?”

But where were they living, and what kind of work was Mary doing, and how did they meet in the first place and when, and who did Mary love before Bill, and if he was her First Great Love, who was her first not-so-great love? In other words, after cheerleading for Roseburg High and the white strapless formal she wore to Prom with the date who turned out to be allergic to her corsage, what happened to Mary Richards? Who was she in the snowy-deep antecedent of Now?

Let’s remember that when my beloved and I arrive in Pittsburgh, we’re strangers to the place and to the people, too. We don’t have so much as a Phyllis for close to a thousand miles. Sign a lease for us? The prospect, in retrospect, sounds grand. We could be women from anywhere, seeking anything. We’re writers after all. We could spin quite a yarn.

But some stories would suit the fringes of Penn’s Woods better than others—campfire stories, something to roast a marshmallow to. These people are going to keep asking, “Are you sisters?” “Are you cousins?” “Are you very best friends?” These people are going to keep asking, “Where do you come from, and why do you come here, and why are you traveling together?”

And where were we living and what kind of work were we doing, and how did we meet in the first place and when, and who did we love before each other, and were we each other’s first great loves? What happened to us before the Keystone, before the long tunnel through the mountain and the three rivers and the delta? What happened to us before the glassy sky like a snow globe and the city with all the bridges inside?

We open the cover and read aloud the first line of the dedication page. Soon, they are shaking their heads; soon, they have stoppered their ears.

It’s true there was a man I might have married, but I didn’t. It’s true there was a dress I might have worn to my wedding, but I didn’t. There was even a ring I took to the pawn shop at the eleventh hour, hawked for small potatoes so my new love and I go could for Thai food and have the sushi, too. There was a phone call with my parents that didn’t end well, another dial tone reverberating in my ears. Can you be fired from a family? There was a ceremony where we could have walked together in our newest caps and gowns, but we didn’t. Instead, a hotel, and in the hotel was a bed, and in the bed was a world we were remaking in our image. No, we never wanted to get up. No, we never wanted to part those curtains and face that world.

Let’s recall the lyrics from the first season song: How will you make it on your own? Girl this time you’re all alone. There were two of us in the Ford Taurus wagon we called Stella, but we were wondering the same thing as we drove into that twilit city, roads slick with summer rain. How would we make it on our own? This was my first car and Angie’s fifth. We bought it from a shady auto dealer in Oak Harbor. He rushed the sale, and we signed our names because it had a big trunk and seats that could fold down. “We’re moving across the country,” we said.

These were the days when bravery and bravado sounded the same. We signed our names because we were late for a poetry reading and had to get back. This was the kind of trip you can only take once, the ultimate carpe diem tabula rasa amor vincit omnia. We signed our names because we didn’t know when, if ever again, we’d be bound to each other this way: two women linked and equal by law, their names paratactic on a single page.

Like Mary, we drove to a new metropolis with no place to live, no jobs to report to first thing Monday morning. But we were unlike Mary, too, in ways that would come to matter more: we were women not seeking or open to romantic attachments with men.

Angie knew about Mary by then. She had seen the archive, watched the episodes, heard the stories of the way my life tilted on an MTM axis all these years. “Some people just drink to excess,” she quipped, but then she was serious. Her eyes were impossibly blue: “Most people have a repressive family, and they rebel. That’s what I did. They feel at odds with the world around them, so they lash out, or they self-destruct. But I’m not sure I ever met anyone who—what—recast herself to make her whole world more habitable?”

Speaking of habitable: I had copied verbatim these notes from the MTM set designers:

A room. Actually, an entire apartment, but a single large room. There are some—mostly of the working-girl variety—who would consider this place a “great find”: ten-foot ceilings, pegged wood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and, most important, a fantastic ceiling-height corner window. Right now the room is totally empty, but it won’t be for long. It will be the main setting for THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW. So God Bless It.

And what were the odds that on our first morning in this unfamiliar city we would come upon a FOR RENT sign in the window of a charming Squirrel Hill apartment building? “It’s the third floor,” I murmured, like Mary’s, and when the man from the realty company came to meet us, we followed him up the stairs and waited as he unlocked the door, and then we entered the enormous empty room and stood beguiled—the high ceilings, the wood floors, the fireplace with its little hearth, and the fantastic atrium in the corner with its tall windows and crystalline doors.

I wrote in my journal: THE MAIN SETTING—we have found it!

“The Interview”

I walk two miles from our new apartment to the private women’s college, and by the time I arrive, the thin white copy of my résumé has wilted in my hands. My hair is wet as if I have gone swimming, and for the rest of the afternoon, sweat continues its steady trickle down my spine.

Humidity: another initiation.

But I take as a good sign that my interview for the position of “Public Safety Secretary” has been scheduled in an old Victorian house with a woman’s name: Lindsay House. I would have preferred Mary House, of course, but the job-seeker in the new city cannot be choosy. Her past has been reduced to a soggy lily in her hand, and all her references live in different time zones.

“Are you Julie?” the man in the polo shirt with the College insignia inquires.

“I am. Are you Bernie?”

He nods and extends his hand. “Boy are we glad to see you!”

I glance around the foyer, but there is no one else there—only Bernie, who wears an empty holster at the hip of his navy Dockers. “Right this way.” He holds a door for me, and I step into his sunlit office.

“I’m going to level with you,” he says, collapsing with a dramatic sigh into his desk chair. “We’re in a bit of a pickle. The school year’s about to start, which means the front office is going to be jammed with faculty, staff, and students all trying to purchase their parking permits. We’re the campus police department, but we also handle permits—and of course, parking enforcement, meaning tickets, too.”

“OK.” I am still concerned about the holster at his hip, scanning the room as discreetly as possible for some sign of the missing gun. “I brought my résumé, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the heat—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bernie says. “I already read what you uploaded to the Human Resources portal. That’s why I called you in.”

“OK.” I nod again. “I feel confident that with a Master’s degree in English, I can facilitate whatever paperwork—”

“Sure, sure, sure.” He waves his hand as if to say, Your qualifications don’t really concern me. “It’s not a hard job exactly. I mean, we only require a high school diploma. The issue is more dealing with the public. It’s a customer service kind of thing.”

“Well, I have a lot of retail experience, too, and I’m generally pretty patient—”

“I don’t know if I made this clear on the phone, but our last Public Safety Secretary died.” Bernie’s pale face is turning mauve now, and I realize that the tone I hear in his voice is not empathy or compassion but undeniable irritation.

“I’m not a superstitious person exactly, but if I didn’t know better, I’d say she did it on purpose. Left here in a huff on a Friday afternoon—early, I might add—shouting about how I was going to give her a heart attack, and the next thing you know, we get a call that she’s died of a heart attack. Took her work keys with her, and no one in her family could find them. Had to break the locks on all the filing cabinets. The whole thing has been a real mess.”

“Hmm.” I try my best to channel Linda Breuer’s tranquil face, but my eyes still search for the gun.

“She was a difficult person. We’ve had a lot of difficult people in this job. We’re looking for someone to put a—how can I say this?—a nicer face on Public Safety. People mostly come here when they’ve got a problem, so the person in your position can’t be the problem, do you see what I’m saying?”

I nod again and smile. Bernie’s thin blond hair cannot conceal the way the mauve tides have risen and spread across his head.

“I like that. I bet you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have to be told to smile. We can use some of that positive energy around here. And you’re about to be a graduate student at the University? Is that what I read?”

“Yes. I’m a writer.”

“Well, that’s terrific because we have a log you’ll need to update every day, documenting incidents—criminal, medical, etcetera—that the police officers were called to investigate. Sometimes it’s broken air-conditioning units in the dorms or ducks blocking traffic on the road. You can’t believe some of the things people report.”

He leans back in his chair now, stretches his arms, almost as if he’s forgotten I’m here. Then, he says, “You know I really like the Seattle area. That’s where you’re from, right?”

“Yes. It’s beautiful—as I’m sure you know.”

“Well, I haven’t actually been out west,” he says, “but I got pretty deep into the whole Twin Peaks thing in the ‘90s, and I just love Frasier. Those guys are a hoot.”

I decide it isn’t wise to tell him I’ve never seen either show, so instead I say, “I’m kind of a classic TV buff myself. I like Perry Mason and Get Smart—” he’s grinning now, as I guessed he would be—“and my favorite of all is Mary Tyler Moore.”

“That Girl, right?” he says, snapping his fingers. “I like her, too. Lots of pep. And what was her boyfriend’s name?”

It’s all I can do to suppress my groan at this unholy comparison. Ann Marie was to Mary as Wonderbread was to stone ground wheat. She was Cool Whip to Mary’s real whipped cream, milquetoast to Mary’s milkshake fortified with fruit and flax.

“Oh, that’s Marlo Thomas actually. Her boyfriend on the show was named Donald, I think.”

“Right, right. Donald!” Bernie looks pleased, as if we’ve been discussing an old friend of his. “They were great together.” He pauses for a moment, leafs through some papers on his desk, then asks me with a look of fatherly concern: “Did you really move all the way across the country by yourself?”

“No, I—” I never said I did—“I moved here with my partner.”

Bernie mulls this information over for a minute before he replies. “Well, this job is twenty hours a week, and I’m happy to hire you for it, but only if you’re sure you have the time to commit.”

“Absolutely! Time management is my strong suit,” I pledge with gusto.

“Well, let’s hope so—what with graduate school and a whole other business on the side.”

“So what did you say after that?” Angie is still unpacking boxes as I stand with my back to the fan and slowly peel off my clothes.

“It took me a minute to really understand that he didn’t understand what I meant by partner. I said I didn’t have a side business, and then he asked me what I had a partner for, so I said love and companionship, and then he got all pink again—really flustered, you know—and said he’d show me where the Public Safety Secretary sits.”

“Is that really the job title, in 2003?”

“It really is. Says so right on the main door.”

“Well, at least there’s a bright side,” Angie says, grinning at me.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll be working in your favorite era!”

“The Mighty Ohio”

The city of Pittsburgh is mentioned only once on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but even that fact is a surprise. The moment is memorable because the city is used as one of the show’s most inventive comparisons. Georgette tells Mary that she and Rhoda are “like Pittsburgh,” a simile Mary tries to ignore, but her curiosity, like ours, soon enough gets the better of her.

“All right, Georgette. How are Rhoda and I like Pittsburgh?” Georgette goes on to explain that Pittsburgh is the place where the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River meet. By themselves, these are just “two skinny little rivers,” but when they come together in Pittsburgh, they form the mighty Ohio River, which is far more powerful than either can be on its own.

“That was my first geography lesson about the mid-Atlantic,” I tell Angie as we stand together in Three Rivers Park. “I wrote it down in case I ever happened to be in Pittsburgh.”

“And now,” she says, with ta-dah hands, “here we are!”

We don’t know yet that we’re going to make friends in Pittsburgh, or that I’ll publish my first poems and essays while we live here, or that Angie will become a librarian. We can’t imagine that in another decade, there will be a landmark civil rights case declaring Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, and when that happens, we will become eligible to marry and to receive federal recognition of our marriage. Such things seem unthinkable now.

We don’t know yet that Angie’s sister is going to have children who will become our niece and nephews, though we do know that aunts are important. Mary Richard’s Aunt Flo, played by Eileen Heckart, was one of the women who inspired her to pursue a career in news, and then of course Mary went on to inspire Bess not to lose her mind over her mother. Years from now, our niece Evie will announce that she wants to write “stories of other people’s lives and also autobiographies.”

“Did you know that Mary Tyler Moore’s real-life aunt was the one who gave her the famous tam? It wasn’t part of the script or anything. She just knew Mary was going to Minneapolis to shoot the opening credits and was worried that she was going to be cold,” I tell Angie.

“No, I didn’t know,” she says, catching on quickly. “But if we ever have a niece, maybe we should give her a tam.”

All we know right now is that we are two women alone on a delta. Angie is the Allegheny, and I am the Monongahela, and somehow together we must become the mighty Ohio.

“What is Julie Wade Really Like?”

Sometimes I find myself standing on a crowded corner in the city, and I want to feel it—that extraordinary surge of freedom and independence that prompted Mary to twirl and toss her tam. But then I think I see my mother in the crowd, and she seizes the day in a different way than the saying intends. I freeze with fear. I fail to cross with the other pedestrians.

Or sometimes I think I see my father in a row of men waiting for the bus, and I want to run up to him and ask if he really believes my life is a sin. Or that woman there, in the café window, who could be my grandmother: I know in my heart I’m never going to see her again. Or that woman there, feeding the meter or feeding the birds: she could be my aunt Linda, who still has time, I think, to come around.

“You know, your grad school insurance might pay for you to see somebody,” Angie suggests.

“Do you think I’m flailing?”

“No, but I think you’re struggling more than you have to be. It was a big step telling your parents you wouldn’t move home and get help for your—‘homosexual tendencies.’” We put a lot of things in air quotes these days because so many words don’t feel like our own.

So I find a therapist in Squirrel Hill who mentions “family trauma” and “LGBT” on his list of specialties. I climb the narrow stairs to his office every week. I take some comfort in the fact that his last name is Weise, which when pronounced aloud is indistinguishable from “wise.”

After I have been seeing Dr. Weise for several months, he stops me mid-sentence one morning with a gentle splay of his palm: “You know, Julie, you don’t have to tell me what you think I want to hear. You can tell me what you think you want to say.”

“Do I seem disingenuous to you?” I ask, concerned.

“No. It’s more that you seem like you’re holding back, not wanting to say the wrong thing or make me uncomfortable in any way.”

“I haven’t always been like that, believe me. I used to say whatever came into my head.”

“Everything? No filter at all?” He looks surprised.

“Well, I mean, not everything—and certainly not to everyone—but more than I say now.”

“What kinds of things didn’t you say, growing up?” I notice that Dr. Weise always sits very straight in his chair, and though he sometimes makes notations on the yellow legal pad, he never fidgets. He always seems fully present in the moment at hand.

“Gay things, I guess.”

“Like, attraction to other girls?”

I nod, and even though I know I am one of his specialties, I still feel awkward naming it, that thing which has the power to divide us.

“You didn’t confide in anyone, even your best friend or your mentor?”

“Well, it’s different being an ally than it is being the person who needs the ally. I mean, I didn’t even know the word ally when I was growing up, but I wanted to be a good person, and I thought that meant being kind and open-minded, like Mary Richards. But if you’re an ally, you still hold most of the cards. It’s not as vulnerable a position because you’re choosing to show compassion. I feel vulnerable all the time now because I can’t trust who my allies are.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Sure.” I shrug. “Every day is an example. I go to work at the Public Safety Office, and there are all these police officers there, and they seem to like me well enough, but they don’t know how to talk to me. Heather is young—she’s close to my age—and she always tells me about her dating life, and then she says things like ‘You wouldn’t understand’ or ‘You don’t have to deal with things like that.’ And there’s this middle-aged officer named Dennis who saw me wearing a tie one day—I always wanted to wear a tie, and I found one I liked at the Goodwill, so I wore it with a white button-down shirt and a long corduroy skirt. It made me think of the episode where Mary wears a suit to work on the day she’s going to be interviewed about what it’s like to be the only woman in the newsroom. Dennis asked, ‘So are you wearing that because you’re—you know—’, and then he couldn’t finish the sentence because nothing he was going to say would have been appropriate, and he already has some strikes against him for protocol violations. Finally, after a lot of stammering and throat-clearing, he said, ‘Do a lot of women you know dress that way?’ I told him ‘Just Mary Richards,’ kind of as a joke, and he said, ‘Is that your girlfriend?’ No one there can even remember Angie’s name.”

Dr. Weise uncaps his pen, as if he’s going to write something down, but then he doesn’t. “You know, I’m an ally—I mean, I think of myself that way—but you’re right about something important I hadn’t thought of before. I do get to choose to be that way, and I suppose I could choose at any time to be another way. There are different consequences for you, having chosen to be out of the closet. You can’t control how other people are going to react.” I’m not the best at reading upside down, but I think he sketches Agency? on the page.

“I’m struck by the fact that we were talking about ways you might censor yourself or hold back parts of yourself you’re concerned aren’t pleasing to other people, but the examples you gave are more about other people censoring themselves around you, displeasing you.”

It isn’t a question, so when I don’t reply, he tries again. “What do you think people are missing about you? What is your family missing about you? What is Julie Wade really like?”

I smile at him broadly now. “That’s the name of the episode! The one where Mary wears the suit! It’s called ‘What is Mary Richards Really Like?’”

“If you want,” Dr. Weise says—“if it’s easier, you can tell me what Mary Richards is like first. Just don’t forget that this is your story, so we have to come back to you at the end.”

“There are 446 Bridges in Pittsburgh, and Mary Richards is One of Them”

The scene opens with an aerial view of Pittsburgh, taken from Mount Washington. The triangle shape of the city is visible, along with many of the bridges, and prominent in the foreground is the iconic red tram of the Duquesne Incline inching its way up the hill. Cut to a silver station wagon with Washington plates passing through the Fort Pitt Tunnel as we hear How will you make it on your own? Show the faces of two young women in the front seat of that car, then pan out to show the confluence of the three rivers. The station wagon heads east on Interstate 376, passing the downtown skyscrapers as we hear This world is awfully big (make note the PPG building that looks like a glass castle, crenellated at the top), and girls this time you’re all alone. Cut to the apartment in Squirrel Hill with the tall windows and the wood floors. Let the camera sweep past the tiny bedroom in the back, showing only one bed—cozy with blue quilt and green blanket—and the wicker IKEA chair in the corner. Now the partners are in the kitchen pulling their first Thanksgiving turkey from the oven as we hear But it’s time you started living. They’re running together down the steep slope of Panther Hollow in their summer clothes (tank tops, shorts)—try to pick up the purple quality of the heat as the air seems to swaddle the trees—then transition to the partners still running but now in their winter clothes (fleeces, gloves, tights) as they pass through Schenley Park and alongside the stunning Phipps Conservatory in sync with the words It’s time you let someone else do some giving. Now they’re in their work clothes on the city bus, standing and gazing out the window as they approach the Cathedral of Learning. We hear Love is all around, no need to waste it as the camera takes in the magnificence of this gothic structure, students and tourists alike flooding the doors. You can have the town, why don’t you take it shows the partners getting coffee at Kiva Han. You might just make it after all guides the transitions to a letter in the mailbox, Julie’s key turning the lock, and then her hand reaching inside. In the final transition, she’s running up the stairs outside the Mellon Institute where Angie has just stepped outside. Julie’s waving the letter, and we can see that she’s been admitted to a PhD program in Louisville. You might just make it after all is repeated as they embrace at the base of one of those dramatic columns. It’s winter, and they’re both wearing swing coats. Julie puts her hands into Angie’s pockets, and they’re kissing, leaning against the column, as the music fades.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose, including the recently released Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus.